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National security advisor Condoleezza Rice emphasizes to Cuban-American lawmakers that President Bush won't back down on his views. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice has written South Florida Republican legislators to stress that President Bush is committed to the economic embargo against Cuba and bringing democracy to the island. Her letter underscores the importance in the next presidential election of the Cuban-American electorate, a voting block considered necessary by the GOP to win in Florida, which is expected to be a key state. Rice, writing to State Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, was responding to a letter that GOP state legislators had...

HAVANA (AP) -- A Cuban cigar maker has shattered his own record for the world's longest cigar by rolling a 45-foot-long stogie, the Guinness Book of World Records said. It took Jose Castelar Cairo five days to manufacture the cigar - a feat that far surpassed his 35-foot cigar that set the record in 2000. The latest and greatest cigar was rolled in November, but only recently certified by Guinness. Castelar proudly displayed both Guinness certificates on Thursday. Castelar's first milestone was a 9-foot cigar he and his buddies rolled in 1999 as a way to attract passing tourists. "We...

<p>It is not an overstatement to argue that George W. Bush is president today largely because of Cuban Americans. After Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno ordered an armed raid to take 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez away from his family and ship him off to communist Cuba, outraged Cuban Americans turned out in force to vote against Democratic candidate Al Gore in retribution for the administration's mistreatment of one of their own. More than 80 percent of Florida's 400,000 Cuban-American votes were delivered for Mr. Bush in 2000. This put him over the top in that state's close election, and thus, provided the electoral votes to defeat Mr. Gore.</p>

With political tension building over the U.S. government's decision to ship 12 boat hijacking suspects back to face prison in Cuba, Gov. Jeb Bush took the unusual step Thursday of criticizing his own brother's administration for the negotiations that led to the repatriation. The governor's rebuke, delivered during an interview with The Herald, comes as President Bush and the Republican Party face a rising tide of anger among Cuban-American exile leaders, who say last week's repatriation of the boaters is the latest offense by a GOP president who has failed to fulfill campaign promises to toughen policies targeting Fidel Castro's...

Twelve Cuban migrants attempt to cross the Florida Straights Wednesday, July 16, 2003 in a boat fashioned out of a 1951 Chevy pickup truck driving it within 40 miles of the United States before they were found by the U.S. Coast Guard (news - web sites) and returned to Cuba. (AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard, Gregory Wald)

For nearly four decades, Cuba has maintained sophisticated electronic intelligence- gathering and offensive capabilities, which range from tapping U.S. phone conversations to jamming radio communications signals and launching computer viruses. To date, U.S. decision-makers have done little more than work around them, since they were never considered serious threats. Washington should reconsider that stance in light of the following events: Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts to Iranian audiences have been jammed, and Cuba is a prime suspect in this obstruction; Cuba has drafted proposals for a United Nations summit on information technology promoting the legalization of jamming and state control...

The United States Monday repatriated 15 Cubans who had been aboard a Cuban government boat they seized at gunpoint last week and was later intercepted in international waters off the Bahamas by the U.S. Coast Guard. The return came after the Cuban government promised that anyone found guilty in the case would receive no more than ten years in prison. The return of the 15 Cubans followed intensive bilateral contacts climaxed by a diplomatic note from Cuba pledging the ten-year limit on any jail terms handed down in the case. The affair began last Tuesday, when 11 Cuban men and...

POTEAU — Authorities remain uncertain about the identity and significance of a man arrested in Sequoyah County who is of interest to several federal agencies. The man who identified himself as Juan Carlos Fals may have as many as 15 aliases, said Richard Gray, district attorney. Fals appears to have two social security numbers and has a record of arrests in Florida, but his booking photo in Sequoyah County does not match a photo taken by Florida authorities. “We don’t know who he is, but this thing has escalated and we may be sitting on a powder keg,” Gray said....

Wake Me Up When Cuba Is Free At Last! By Donnel Jones, June 14, 2003 Home   Search   Forum   Terms I really can't bear it. Castro has flipped his lid and is alienating one of his few, remaining allies: the European Union. Whatever unlikely moral intelligence is left in the E.U., it should be commended for aligning itself with the United States in its censure of Cuba's most recent brutal crackdown on dissidents. Of course, this censure took the form of an announcement that the E.U. would "review" its relationship with the Caribbean dictatorship, so one shouldn't get one's hopes up. To help...

<p>HAVANA (AP) - Fidel Castro's government dealt a crippling blow to Cuba's opposition movement Monday, sentencing peaceful activists, journalists and an economist to up to 27 years in prison for allegedly collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state.</p>

DALLAS (AP) _ Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban pulled an April Fools' gag during a timeout in the second quarter of Tuesday night's game against the New Orleans Hornets, getting into a shoving match with a phony game official. Cuban, heavily fined last season for his complaints about officiating, went onto the court during the stoppage in play and began arguing with a man dressed as a game official. Cuban began shoving the man and was restrained by one of the team's equipment managers before it became apparent that the incident had been staged. The real officials chuckled at Cuban's...

"Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace. The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if...

Cuban torturers hiding in Florida?Officials searching for men who brutalized Americans in Vietnam A special criminal investigations unit in the U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing reports that two notorious Cuban nationals suspected of participating in a brutal torture program conducted against American POWs in Vietnam are hiding somewhere in southern Florida. A public affairs spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation, citing policies on open cases, but former State Department official Richard Krieger, who now directs Florida-based International Educational Missions, which haunts foreign war criminals and human-rights violators in the U.S., said that "Justice is...

<p>MIAMI SHORES, Fla. (AP) -- A municipal building inspector was fired after telling a newspaper columnist that south Florida's influx of Cuban immigrants led to the demise of the Orange Bowl parade.</p> <p>Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede also wrote that Charley Esher, 72, blamed Cubans and other immigrants for local government corruption.</p>

More Facts Uncovered in Chavez - Al Qaeda Collaboration Major Juan Diaz Castillo:Planned $1M support forAl Qaeda, then defected By Luis Garcia, in Miami Whistle-blower Major Juan Diaz Castillo, pilot of the Venezuelan Airforce One, revealed more details of how president Hugo Chavez supported Al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11. In statements to the press in Miami Saturday, the defector shed new light on the terrorist support network recently uncovered in the highest level of the Venezuelan government. Major Juan Diaz Castillo, Chavez's personal pilot, was assigned the job of planning the delivery of the $1 million collaboration to...

[Warning: Link may expire] Montreal - A Cuban man who hid in the wheel compartment of a DC-10 jet wrapped his shirt around heating pipes to survive temperatures of nearly 40 below zero and avoid falling out during the four-hour flight to Canada. "I consider myself very lucky to have survived. Thank God," the stowaway, in his 20s, said Monday night after his first appearance before the refugee panel. The man, who cannot be identified by name under a publication ban imposed by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, has been ordered held until a hearing Friday. Robert Gervais, a spokesman...

<p>KEY WEST, Florida (CNN) --Three years to the day after Elian Gonzalez was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida, a 13-year-old Cuban boy was found Monday hiding on a boat, raising thorny legal issues reminiscent of the Gonzalez case.</p>

Almost Blowing Up The WorldA Child's Memoir Of The Cuban Missile Crisis — Or, How I Escaped The ApocalypseBy Jerry Cimisi Forty years ago in late October, I came in from a lovely autumn day and sat down to dinner, surprised to see President Kennedy on the gray-blue cast of our black and white television, pre-empting reruns of the Three Stooges to announce that the Soviet Union was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Thus began a vivid fearful week in the life of an eleven year-old boy who lived in Rosedale, Queens. The fear was not irrational. The memories are...

<p>TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) --  Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday named a grandson of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista as the first Hispanic on the Florida Supreme Court.</p> <p>Raoul Cantero III, a Miami attorney and Harvard Law School graduate, replaces Justice Major Harding, who is retiring after 11 years.</p>